Watch: Why food transparency matters

At the 2012 TEDxManhattan, Cara Rosaen from Real Time Farms explained why knowing where your food comes from is important. She also introduced her website, which aims to track food from any farm to any plate.

It looks like all the talks from last month's TEDxManhattan: Changing the Way We Eat are now on YouTube. The talk below was given by Cara Rosaen, the co-founder of a crowd-sourced website Real Time Farms. In the viddeo, she explains how Real Time Farms works and why a site that lets people track the origins of the foods they are buying in restaurants, stores, and markets is important.

Real Time Farms is such a huge undertaking, especially when you realize that one of the goals is to include information on where the food from school lunches was grown. I can’t imagine going online to see the school lunch calendar and being able to click on a food and being directed to the source of that food. Wouldn’t that be amazing?

I loved the story about her dad and the ribs at the beginning, too. Her realization, that we’re never going to get people to change the way they eat by making them feel judged or guilty, is right on the money. Instead of making people feel judged, we need to excite them. Well said.